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You signed up for the Observability Digest, and it went quiet for a stretch. It is back now, on a clearer footing.
The Signal Drops you have been getting in between, on the people-and-leadership side of running observability under pressure, are deliberate, and they stay. What was missing was the monthly round-up you actually subscribed to, and a clear promise for it. So here it is: observability you can act on, whether you build it or lead it, plus the few signals worth your time. My read on what actually mattered is the spine, technical where it needs to be; a short list of outside reads is the supporting act. Monthly for now, fortnightly once the rhythm holds.
One ask before you read on. Tell me which cut you want and I will sort the rest:
Reply TECH for the hands-on, practitioner cut.
Reply LEADERSHIP for the strategy cut.
Do nothing to keep the full issue.
One word. Change it whenever.
This month's deep dive
Security just bought observability. A $3.35bn deal closed, two more followed, and the vendors have now decided security and observability are one market. The teams have not: roughly 80% already share the tools, only about 45% agree on how to use them. You can buy the converged platform. You cannot buy the converged team.
🎧 Listen: the podcast · 📖 Read the companion piece: on the blog
Analytics on Live Data. No Pipeline. Just Postgres.
Most teams treat analytics as a separate problem. As data grows, they add a warehouse, a pipeline, a sync job. By the time data reaches their dashboard, it's already stale.
TimescaleDB takes a different approach: extend Postgres instead of splitting away from it.
Your transactions and your analytics run on the same database, on live data, with no pipeline in between.
Hypertables partition time-series data automatically as volume grows. Hypercore compression cuts storage by up to 95%. Continuous aggregates pre-compute rollups so dashboards stay fast without re-querying everything.
CERN runs it on Postgres to handle sensor data from the Large Hadron Collider.
No second database. No migration. Same Postgres you already know.
On the blog this month
I publish these to the site, not your inbox, so here is the month in one place (round up EVERY web-only blog):
The Regulator Is Not the Brake on AIOps. It Is the Design Spec. The honest state of AIOps in regulated banking: only about 2% of AI in financial services runs fully autonomously, and the gates that earn the rest. Read it.
SecOps is buying observability; the deep dive above is on the blog for the long read. Read it.
From my feed
A few things I posted this month that landed:
Most observability spend goes to detection, the 10%. The dashboard shows what you measured, not what matters. The other 90%, coordination and ownership, is where the time actually goes.
The next tool is not the answer. The arrival fallacy in ops: the thing we chase was never on the other side of the purchase; it was on the other side of the work.
The loudest person in the incident channel is a signal, not a problem. Anger is usually fear wearing a hi-vis vest, pointing straight at the risk.
I post these as they land. Follow on LinkedIn.
Worth your attention
Outside reads that earned it this month:
Palo Alto completes its $3.35bn Chronosphere acquisition, the deal that started this conversation. Palo Alto Networks
Forrester on why this is a dual-motive, AI-driven move, and who gets subordinated. Forrester
Snowflake buys Observe; Cisco moves for Galileo. The convergence did not stop in 2025. TechCrunch
Worth a listen
Four I actually listened to this month, two technical, two on leadership:
Charity Majors on observability 1.0 vs 2.0 (podcast interview): why the "three pillars" were a vendor convenience, and what wide events and high cardinality actually change.
Open Observability Talks (Dotan Horovits): OpenTelemetry's CNCF graduation and where eBPF continuous profiling is heading. Why OTel is now a safe long-term bet to build on.
Sir Gareth Southgate on the High Performance podcast: leading under relentless scrutiny, and how rehearsing the hard moment turned England's penalty shootouts from a lottery into a practised process.
No Bullsh*t Leadership (Martin Moore), "12 Hard Leadership Truths": single-point accountability, speed over consensus, and grace under pressure. Hard truths that map onto running an incident.
That is the reset. Monthly, short, judgement first. If a month is light, it stays short. Next month I take the convergence question one layer down: who actually gets the call when the merged platform goes dark.
Allan
📕 The book is out. Metrics & Mayhem: A CTO's Guide to Observability That Actually Works. Kindle, paperback and hardback.